Existence and the Origin of Universes
This is my latest attempt to summarize my ideas regarding why existence exists and how our universe came to be.
—Jerry Abbott
Under Construction: 24 April 2006
Similar existential ideas presented in relation to Cosmotheism can be found here.
The stuff of existence is energy in all its forms, including matter. The usual manifestation for energy is quantum chaos. Our structured universe is made of energy, too. But although universes are instances of a "natural" state that energy may occupy, they are anomalous and secondary substates in existence.
Uncaused quantum events, such as virtual particle pairs and vacuum fluctuations, are normally the dominant events, which conserve the chaos that permitted them to occur. These quantum events aren't entailed by existence; they are existence. They transcend universes and don't depend on whatever natural laws might pertain to any universe.
The energy of the quantum chaos is actually greater than the causalty-bound regimented energy that exists within universes, but the chaos energy occurs with self-effacing habits: random polarization, random frequency, random phase, destructive interference, etc. Consequently, mighty though it is in absolute summation, the chaos energy suffers from much self-cancelation and thus it isn't much noticed on scales larger than the quantum scale. Experiments can, however, be devised to prove that it exists. Quantum chaos energy can be observed in physical phenomena such as the Lamb shift and the Casimir effect.
The Lamb shift is a slight broadening of spectral lines in starlight caused by the dipole electric fields of virtual electron-positron pairs that occur along the light's path. The Casimir effect is the pressure from zero-point energy that tends to push two very closely separated parallel conductive plates toward each other. Weak though it's effects are, the presence of quantum chaos energy can nonetheless be observed.
The reason universes appear as a secondary energy state—i.e., a substate within the dominant state of quantum chaos—has to do with the statistics of the quantum chaos energy. Most of the time, quantum chaos doesn't do anything spectacular simply because spectacular events have very low probabilities. So most of what happens in a condition of pure chaos is the garden variety stuff, such as virtual particles and randomly polarized fluxes of electromagnetic energy. But "low" probability is not the same thing as impossible, and however rare they might be, spectacular events are certain to occur at least once in a while.
That is, every now and then, in the transuniversal ocean of cosmic chaos, a great deal of energy appears in phase and reasonably matched in frequency and polarization. This flash of energy occurs within a volume small enough that it all exists within its own Schwartzschild radius, and thus it falls into a black hole of its own making. Once the energy is under this event horizon, it no longer has a path for normal thermodynamic dispersal back to the region from whence it came. Instead, it must find other ways of moving back toward higher-probability states.
Probably the first thing that happens is that some of the energy changes its form by becoming space. A great deal of new space is created simply because energy finds its easiest route to higher probability states by making this "phase change." That's why we observe an Inflation Era in the early history of our universe.
The energy that does not partake in the creation of space remains as radiation, possibly with a distribution of photon energy consonant with a hot blackbody. The photons with energies greater than about 1 MeV engage in pair production, generating quarks and leptons, and their antiparticles.
Now we come to a pecularity in which our universe was made. The sort of quarks and leptons that appear by pair production depends on certain constants of quantum chromodynamics. The kind of quarks that appear in a universe determines whether hadrons will appear, and, if so, what properties they will have. It was our good luck that our universe came up the kind of quarks that make protons and neutrons, instead of some other gang of quarks which might make useless hadrons or perhaps no hadrons at all.